‘Be the Solution to Soil Pollution’ – World Soil Day being observed today

The theme for this year’s World Soil Day is – ‘Be the Solution to Soil Pollution’.

Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu has called upon people to take pledge to maintain the purity of soil. In a tweet, he said, it is the duty of every human being to protect the most critical component of nature.

He said, it is time that people should move towards nature and organic farming and must learn to protect the purity of soil and mother earth.

The Vice President said, it is high time people learn to love and live with nature and stop playing with it.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, soil holds three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and can help meet the challenges of a changing climate.

It said, 815 million people are food insecure and 2 billion people are nutritionally insecure, but it can be mitigated through soil. 95 per cent of food comes from soil and 33 per cent of the global soils are already degraded.

The Centre has launched nationwide Soil Health Card Scheme to take care of Soil Health for the first time in a uniform manner to evaluate the soil fertility across the country. According to Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, over 15 crore Soil Health Cards have been distributed to the farmers across the country.

Soil health card provides information to the farmers on fertility status of their soil and enables them to apply soil health card based recommended dosages of fertilizers including micro-nutrients, bio-fertilizers, manures as well as soil ameliorants.

It is helpful in checking the declining fertility of agriculture land and improve the fertility of soils to increase productivity besides enhancing farmers income.